plaguedworldfandomcom-20200213-history
Salvatore Moretti
Salvatore Moretti was created by Drew on August 13, 2013. Personality Although Salvatore is seldom vicious or even mean, he's hardly the pinnacle of friendliness and compassion. Even from a young age he was able to turn on a superficial glib when necessary, although that's certainly not always (or even mostly) successful. He knows from experience, for the most part, who will fall for an outward display of overzealous charm and appeal and who's perceptive enough to know better than to believe what he does. As such, Salvatore is a firm believer in karmic justice and paying for one's own stupidity and foolishness. That's how he justifies scamming people -- the money they give him is hardly more than a "moron tax", in his opinion. When it comes to people he's comfortable with, Salvatore is hardly charming. He tends to be somewhat crass and impatient, and although he generally knows how to get what he wants, he doesn't like to ask for things twice. Apologizing and showing mushy, deep emotions don't come easily to him, and Salvatore doesn't care to rely on others for help. Although he's generally not very cynical, he feels like there's no one he can rely on more effectively than himself. He's independent almost to a fault, and he'll only ever ask for help as an absolute last resort, and even then he's reluctant. Salvatore doesn't like to keep a lot of close friends, and he doesn't tend to pick fights -- he knows when it's in his best interest to keep his mouth shut and when he should speak up. Despite his remorselessness when it comes to conning the weak-minded out of their supplies and money, Salvatore does have a very empathetic side. Although he tends not to show it, he cares deeply for those he dos get close to, and is incredibly loyal when he is at all, and because he's not evil or even too cold-blooded, sometimes he will inconvenience himself if it means saving the life of a human or Vampyre. Salvatore doesn't exactly hold "honor" in high regard, but he does have the capacity to care very deeply for certain people and go to great lengths to keep them safe. However, Salvatore doesn't care for commitment, and although the pursuit of women is far from the top of his list of priorities, he doesn't like to get cozy with a woman for more than a few days at most and he usually doesn't care to concern himself with the affairs of other people. Since the fall of civilization, Salvatore has certainly become more clever and perceptive, although he doesn't tend to be confrontational unless a situation absolutely calls for it. Although he does maintain a hobby of scamming others for supplies and other luxuries he can't bring himself to let go. History Salvatore Vincente Ricci was born on February 28th, 1972, to Claudia Moretti and Gustavo Ricci. He was born out of wedlock, his mother being a poor woman maintaining several jobs, his father a salesman. Although they all lived together, Gustavo was constantly absent, using almost all of his money to support a gambling addiction that he had no desire to alleviate. Because of this, there was hardly enough money for Claudia and Salvatore to survive on. She had to quit most of the jobs she had maintained before so she could have enough time to raise Salvatore. Because of this, Salvatore had to become independent very quickly. On Salvatore's fifth birthday, he awoke to find that Gustavo had taken all of things and left, leaving behind only a note for his mother Voi non significava nulla per me. "You mean nothing to me." He found his mother sobbing over it first thing in the morning, and although at this point he hardly had any reading skills to speak of, he held onto the note for when he could read. Gustavo had taken all of his money with him (as well as what little money of her own Claudia had), had made it clear that he didn't have any plans to return to his emaciated family, which left Claudia effectively broke, having all but abandoned her work to take care of her son. There was just enough food in the house to get them through a few days and Salvatore didn't have enough pocket change to sustain them even for a day. Because of their newly found complete poverty, unbeknown to Salvatore, Claudia reluctantly took up prostitution, often leaving her young son at home while she was out with clients. She had been fired from every other job she had after Salvatore's birth, and she had quickly been replaced. Although she was making enough money now for them to scrape by, Salvatore didn't see much of his mother and he didn't like her being gone so often. His mother's health was declining thanks to the poor health of the vast majority of her clients, and he was astute enough to know that they were going to reach a breaking point eventually. Salvatore, now barely six, took it upon himself to begin learning English, taking to the streets to beg and make up sob stories that made his life seem much more miserable than it was in order to swindle money off of strangers. He very quickly became good at what he did, hiding his new source of income from his mother. She was often too worn out to notice that there was more money than usual in their funds. His mother preached on honest livings and working hard for money, and he knew she wouldn't approve of her young son (and the source of her poverty) swindling people to make money for them to live slightly more luxurious lives. He got progressively better at what he did, although the work became more difficult the older he became. It wasn't until he was eight that he both remembered the note and was proficient enough to read it. Claudia had never told him where Gustavo had gone, nor had she even mentioned the note, since she didn't want Salvatore to grow up hating his father, afraid that it would stem into self-hate. But when he did finally get around to reading the note, a hate for his father blossomed that he never mentioned to his mother. In fact, he had no means to find his father, being only a child and having no clue where Gustavo might have gone, so the most he could do was swear that he would never become like him. He changed his last name to Moretti, having held onto "Ricci" only because he had never thought his father to be so insidious, had been too young to think anything otherwise. By the time Salvatore was ten, the extra income was becoming noticeable. The number of Claudia's clients had declined so far because of her poor health and obvious use. She confronted Salvatore, who resisted but eventually admitted that he had been secretly adding onto their family funds, claiming that these people were only paying for their own stupidity and it was their own fault they gave him money. Claudia broke down right away, seeing what she had reduced her son to, and admitted that she was pregnant again. Salvatore, now semi-fluent in English, offered to continue to help her, although she declined. Apparently she had already arranged to send him off to live with his great-uncle Ernesto in America, in a northeastern town a few miles outside of an urban city called Fort York. The town Ernesto lived in was rural, which was a big change from the more urban place in Tuscany that Salvatore was accustomed to. He didn't speak quite enough English to stay ahead in school, and given how small the town was, he didn't get a lot of help learning the language. He got a lot better very quickly, with no help from Ernesto, who did little more than sit in a recliner and yell for Salvatore to bring him another beer while he watched Wheel of Fortune. Salvatore kept up with his mother, who progressed through the pregnancy with quite a bit of difficulty now that she didn't have money from prostitution or any of the financial padding that Salvatore himself had done, and she didn't have anyone around to support her. Unfortunately there was far from enough money available to send him back home to help her, and she insisted he stay in America with her uncle. Claudia gave birth later on to a girl she named Luisa. Unfortunately, Claudia's poor health nearly killed her in childbirth and gave Luisa severe mental and physical disabilities. Luisa was given ten years maximum to live -- she made it for two weeks before her brain gave out and killed her. Claudia was devastated, and sobbed on the phone to Salvatore for hours, begging to come to America with him. Unfortunately, still being a child himself, he had no way to get her there. The hospital bills had put her in serious debt and Salvatore had no money. Ernesto was living on enough to sustain Salvatore and himself but no one else. He finally got Claudia to hang up, resigned to the fact that she was trapped in Tuscany in huge debt and in too poor a physical condition to take care of herself. That was the last time he ever spoke to her. She never answered another phone call, and all his letters came back to him. He never confirmed that she was dead, but he knew it. And, as guilty as he felt for thinking so, he was relieved. Claudia was probably in a better place now. By the time he was thirteen, he was finally fluent in English, although he still had a strong Italian accent. He had carried his talents from Italy to his school, managing to con his classmates out of their pocket money using little back alley gambling tricks that he almost invariably cheated at, and he had enough friends that he never worried about being fingered as a con. He maintained his grades only through cheating, and was sly enough that he never got caught. Ernesto seldom cared, too old and overfed to move. Salvatore taunted him constantly, knowing he couldn't do anything about it. In high school, Salvatore had more than just a few short-term girlfriends, who were often attracted by his accent and the fact alone that he spoke Italian. He didn't care much for commitment or anything but getting what he wanted. When he was sixteen, Ernesto's heart gave out on him. He died, and since his only available living kin was Salvatore, he got the tiny shack they lived in, as well as a small sum of money that had been left over from his retirement fund. Only a week after Ernesto died and he was left independent, Salvatore dropped out of school, sold the land that Ernesto had left him, and took his money to Fort York. The only thing Salvatore could remember having been good at was swindling the naive and the foolish, and it was a profitable business. His accent had faded enough with practice that it was only noticeable when others listened very closely to the way he sounded. He traveled around a bit in the cities near Fort York, making bank on back alley gambling and little acts of fraud. The problem with money acquired in a not-quite-legal manner was his inability to spend too much of it without having to explain where it came from. He didn't claim very much income or property at all, buying most of what he had on the black market and in back alleys where he felt the most at home. He knew how to avoid getting scammed himself, being a reputable conman. Tourists and the elderly were by far the easiest to trick. As time went on, Salvatore got bolder with his scams. He went from using tricks of sleight of hand in darkened alleys to acts of fraud, promising big trips and rewards for large amounts of money, and then disappearing entirely, using fake addresses, names, and phone numbers. He made huge amounts of money this way, and was good at covering his tracks. It was easy to justify putting people out of huge amounts of money, considering it was only the stupid and senile he ever managed to scam. He seldom targeted people who could afford good lawyers or know quickly enough that they had been scammed. The first time he was caught was also the last. In 2001, when he was twenty-five, he was caught selling a cruise scam, being duped for the first time into dealing with a cop. He was subsequently arrested and held no contest in court. Because he plead guilty to fraud, he was sentenced to seven years in prison with the possibility of parole. Prison wasn't that rough on him. He didn't try to fuck around with anybody, and kept almost entirely to himself. He did what he was told, didn't try to use artificial glib on anybody. To his surprise, it worked. He was let off after six years, in 2007, on parole for good behavior, and although he was certainly laying low, he went right back to what he was doing when he had first arrived in Fort York conning people. He got another job in a warehouse to keep his parole officer off his back. His return to his normal life hardly lasted a year. In 2008, just before his thirty-sixth birthday, civilization collapsed and the dead rose. Satan's forces took over. Because of his connections in the black market, it was easy for Salvatore to get his hands on some weapons to take out the gnarly beasts that seemed to have taken over after rising from the grave. Only a few weeks after the fall of civilization, Salvatore was bitten by an aggressive Overmind who was hell-bent on turning as many people as possible. After being bitten, Satan extended an offer to Salvatore serve under him, as an Overmind, in exchange for power. As far as deals went, it sounded too good to be true, and he knew better than to deal with Satan. But seeing how quickly the world had gone merely at Satan's will, he took the offer and became an Overmind of Greed. For a few months, Salvatore had a blast looting everything he could, figuring that if civilization came back, he'd want to be on top. He used his newfound ability to continue scamming people with little card tricks, although it was much easier to do now that he didn't have to hide it and most people had nothing to lose. Unfortunately nothing like that happened. He knew he had to eat flesh, and he primarily picked it off of the numerous fresh corpses that were around. When he had to kill, he only killed the same way he conned by taking out those stupid enough to trust him, taking out those that deserved to die. He never really thought of himself as evil or even that malicious -- he just figured he was leveraging his assets, using the advantage he had accepted from Satan that others might have been too moralistic or ethical to accept. That life seemed to be short-lived, however. It wasn't in his nature to meddle in the affairs of others, but he needed to eat, and the corpses were becoming too disgusting to stomach. He quickly came across a man and a young girl, whom he presumed to be father and daughter, a few miles outside of Fort York. He was surprised to see such a young child still alive at all, even though he hadn't particularly missed the presence of children -- he'd never much cared for them. The father, soon after Salvatore began watching them out of little more than boredom and curiosity, claimed that he was going out for supplies and return later on. He followed the man, leaving the girl in the warehouse. It became obvious to Salvatore that the man was not coming back, given that he had taken all of his own supplies and weapons with him on a simple supply run. Normally Salvatore wouldn't have cared too much about the girl, but the longer he watched her father and the further it sank in that he was going to let the girl, his daughter, die in a horribly way, he couldn't help but be reminded of his own father leaving him to starve in poverty with his mother. More importantly, he was reminded of the promise he'd made to himself to never become like his father. And watching that man leave the girl helpless was far too much like his father for his liking. Braith, the little girl, came along with him. Because he was an Overmind, he could keep the Lessers off of her. But he couldn't help but feel that the longer he had her with him, the less like an Overmind he felt. It was only a few weeks before he could no longer take it and he finally became a Vampyre: a traitor to Satan, doomed to be tormented in Hell for all eternity when (and if) they died. He wasn't much a fan of the idea that he was doomed, but he never regretted his decision. A lot of the time with Braith when she was younger was spent showing her how to survive. He taught her how to use a gun, and found her some weapons that she could reasonably use. They weren't going to take down any Reavers, but he figured that even a little protection was better than nothing, and he didn't want to give her anything she could hurt herself too badly with. Braith was a curious kid (albeit pretty clever), and fairly often that would get her (and, by association, Salvatore) in trouble. They spent time in Abital when she was a little older (and hardly any wiser), even though he knew that it was no place for a child to be. He didn't bother raising her to be polite or demure, acknowledging that making her like that would only get her killed and that there was no time to waste on trying to force her to be nice to others. He was fairly lenient with her and offered advice when she needed it, although it was easiest for him to just let her learn from her own mistakes. He knew they would sink in better that way.